brent Why aim low on purpose?
I doubt that's a fair assessment. SSDs have a large number of benefits over spinning disks; longer life just isn't one of those. Not yet.
But consider that they're much smaller, allowing computers to be built smaller than in the past. They don't get as hot as HDDs, so less cooling is needed, resulting in reduced fan requirements as well as smaller cases. They require far less electricity to operate, as they have no motors to drive, and that translates to smaller power supplies and lower operating costs. For the most part, they operate much faster, as their data seeking is done electronically instead with a mechanical arm and electromagnets.
The four 10 TB HDDs in my Synology NAS have been there for many years, and for a long time they ran 24/7. About a year ago I needed to get the NAS repaired for a motherboard issue that had nothing to do with the drives, and its OS was updated to a new version that shuts down the drives when they're not needed for a while. Now I notice that the first time I access the NAS in the morning, there's a brief wait while the drives spin up, but during the day they respond quickly.
Every month the NAS sends me an email telling me that the drives are working fine, with no problems discovered. And if a HDD ever fails, it can be replaced with a new one, and the NAS will continue to work just fine, with no data loss. The system has a fault tolerance of one disk. (And 10TB disks today cost about 1/2 as much as the originals did.)
Today, Synology makes NASs that are built to contain SSDs instead of HDDs, taking advantage of the smaller size, and all the other benefits. The largest capacity 2.5" SSDs that I can find on Amazon are 4TB, and they cost about as much as I remember paying for my 10TB HDDs, but I expect them to become cheaper eventually, as they see more and more use in enterprises.
My point is. Synology doesn't manufacture their products largely for home use. Most of their customers are corporations that would not be buying NASs built to contain SSDs if their cost/benefit analyses didn't work out to their advantage. And if corporations weren't buying them, Synology wouldn't be building and selling them. This article explains this trend a lot better than I can, and it makes for an interesting read.
